Nvidia quietly launches GeForce 100-series GPUs

Posted by admin

March 24, 2009

Nvidias GeForce GT 120 is almost identical to the GeForce 9500 GT, except for a slight change in clock speed.

Nvidias recent rebadging exercises havent proved particularly popular with either the press or consumers recently, which could explain why the company hasnt made a big fanfare about its latest rebranding scheme. The company has surreptitiously already launched its new GeForce 100-series, resulting in the GeForce GTS 150, GT 130, GT 120 and G100.

Whats particularly interesting, however, is that we only found out about the cards by browsing through Nvidias website, which lists the new 100-series cards. There were no press calls to discuss the new cards, no hints and not even a press release was issued. This could explain why only a handful of websites picked up the news when it was released earlier this month.

Unlike the recent GeForce GTS 250 rebrand, which resulted in a retail card, the GeForce 100-series cards will only be available to OEMs. As such, theres little chance that upgraders looking for a new graphics card will be misled by the new names, although VR-Zone has dissected the INF files from various recent ForceWare drivers to ascertain that the new GPUs are still based on Nvidias ageing G92, G94, G96 and G98 cores.

Lets start with the G92-based GeForce GTS 150, which features a dual-slot cooler, a 738MHz GPU clock and 128 stream processors clocked at 1,836MHz. This is accompanied by 1GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1GHz (2GHz effective). Bizarrely, these specs are identical to those of the recently-released GeForce GTS 250, which isnt going to help Nvidia’s recent rebranding scheme to make any more sense.

Next we have the GeForce GT 130, which has a 500MHz GPU clock, 48 stream processors clocked at 1,250MHz and 768MB of 500MHz (1GHz effective) DDR2 memory. After that, theres the GeForce GT 120 with 32 stream processors running at 1,400MHz with a GPU core clock of 500MHz and 512MB of 500MHz (1GHz effective) DDR2 memory. This card is very similar to the GeForce 9500 GT, which is otherwise the same, but has a 550MHz GPU core clock. Finally, the GeForce G100 sits at the bottom with just eight stream processors running at 1,400MHz, a 567MHz core clock and 512MB of 500MHz (1GHz effective) DDR2 memory.

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